Essays & Articles

Barbara Speaks to Mum

With her husband the eminent psychiatrist
Fraser McDonald, Jacqueline Fahey lived her
married life in hospital houses until 1984.

Moving to French Bay in Titirangi after a
decade living at Carrington, where Fraser was
Medical Superintendant, Fahey continued to use
her domestic life as the subject matter for her
work. Often, fraught family relationships directed
her pictorial narratives, with the artist invoking
classical mythology to give her imagery
resonance.

In this instance, the three figures depicted are
her elder sister, Barbara, who wears the hat in
the foreground and gestures through a patch of
sunshine yellow; the artist’s youngest daughter,
Emily, sitting back on the couch with her feet up
on the Victorian deal table, and the matriarch
Margaret Fahey, seen in profile at right, seated
in a roll arm chair. In the recently-published
second volume of Jacqueline Fahey’s
autobiography, Before I Forget, there is an
explanation of the greater significance of this
grouping: “Mum had stayed with us at
Carrington after a fall once, and I’d done a lot of
drawings of her. Back in Carrington then I’d had
a lot to do looking after her and I didn’t want to
stress myself out, so I had stopped painting. But
I could not control my looking and seeing and
From Porirua Mental Hospital to Melbourne
(where Fraser trained as a psychiatrist), and
from Kingseat Hospital to Carrington (where
Jacqueline had a run-in with Titewhai
Harawira), she describes a brimming, shifting
life of family, politics, ideals and art.
A distinguished artist, especially known for
her paintings of domestic and suburban life,
Jacqueline Fahey is also a writer. She was one
of the first New Zealand artists to work
explicitly from a woman’s perspective and in
the late 1980s became an influential lecturer
at Elam School of Fine Arts. took to drawing again, often random and
on-the-hoof stuff. Now in Titirangi, seeing more
of Mum, those drawings came back to me.”
This explains the sketchy, seemingly unfinished
aspect of this work, where black outlines
predominate and the colouring has been
abandoned. A shallow interior space gives on to
two large picture windows at the back, with fluffy
clouds in a blue sky and a flash of green bush
visible, the serenity of nature beyond the living
room contrasting with the chaos within it. With
its profusion of diagonals and tangle of lines,
the scene spills toward the viewer like a tilting
stage set.

Aspects of the tableau are recognisable as
symbols of the traditional realm of the
unrelenting tasks of housewifery: the basket of
unfolded washing in its wicker basket and the
skeins of wool on the floor. Flitting birds, found
elsewhere in Fahey’s work where female
characters are shown speaking, animate the air
in concordance with the gesturing of Barbara’s
left hand. Central to the composition is the
three-legged Victorian gypsy fortune-telling
table, topped by letters, with its silken fringe
fiercely bristling, recognisable from a
photographic portrait of Jacqueline Fahey made
in 1987. Beneath one of the bobbin-turned legs,
capitalised letters spell out the work’s title.
Rather than suggesting that Barbara is a
modern-day soothsayer, the tripod table’s
role is to point to the nature of threes, showing
how these women can be seen as a kind of
Holy Trinity.

“MUM” is writ large, but indistinctly, and
similarly, the mother figure is almost
indecipherable, hidden beneath foliage and
scribbled lines. Only her stoic profile seems
resolutely described. In a recent radio interview,
Fahey explained that although she frequently
saw her mother (who lived well into her ninth
decade), they were estranged until almost the
end of Margaret Fahey’s life. Here the artist is
the dispassionate observer, using her imagemaking
skills to configure the emotionally
charged mother-daughter relationship as
universally significant. Before I Forget offers
insight into the intent of this imagery of mother,
daughter, grand-daughter: “Out of that messy
collection [of drawings] came something
consistent: a sort of Greek tragedy-cum-King
Lear rendering of my mother’s decline. Her
handmaidens in her travails were my daughter
Emily and my sister Barbara. They were
placating, soothing, and distressed in
themselves. A grieving Greek chorus. Now in
Titirangi I was able to resolve the compositions
and carry those ideas to fruition…The maiden,
the mature woman and the hag. A female holy
trinity, an eternal cycle. Her shrines had been
established at waterfalls in Ireland. Later the
new priests of Christianity replaced her with the
Virgin Mary.” Typically, Fahey loops back from
her own relationships through Catholicism to
invoke her Irish ancestry, giving a political and
religious twist to her narrative of connection,
while noisily dispelling the ideal of
intergenerational familial harmony.